God works in His own time.

I grew up knowing nothing about the One True Catholic Church. My mom regularly took us to a Methodist service, but by my teens I couldn't see what value Christianity brought and I lost what little faith I had. I was curious about everything, and I made science my authority — the place I took all my questions.

In middle school, a chance online friendship connected me with a girl halfway across the country — a girl who would one day become my wife, the mother of my children, and the one who would introduce me to the Catholic Church. My tiny mustard seed of faith wasn't dead; it was slowly sprouting. God was using the technology of a distracted age to shape my life and bring me to Him.

After college, my curiosity was stronger than ever. I began a PhD at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, searching for microscopic black holes that might rip the universe apart — or reveal hidden dimensions. But every answer I found only explained how the universe worked, never why. Traveling back and forth to Europe, I finally met my pen pal in person; she had landed in New York City, and we began dating. She started taking me to Mass, and though I didn't understand it, my scientific mind kept noticing the patterns in the liturgy and I enjoyed the familiarity we were building.

I proposed, and she accepted. As we prepared for the wedding, I discovered the Church asked us to prepare for something deeper — the marriage itself. I had always thought of marriage as what you did once you grew up and fell in love; now I began to learn it as a sacrament, ordered toward the vocation of family life. Mass became more than something we tried to attend — it became something that defined our relationship. And yet I still didn't understand how much more the Church had to offer me, if only I would show the humility to offer myself to her.

My studies ended with no black holes and no hidden dimensions. I wanted something tangible, and I had built real skills in programming and statistics. We were ready to settle down, so we moved to Texas to put down roots near her family. There my work turned to machine learning — and I began to see that the most fascinating part of creation wasn't the microscopic or the cosmic, but the person. We are shaped profoundly by habit; every moment trains the internal model we live by, and so much of that training happens in the home.

I had never been pressured to become Catholic, but as we were expecting our first child - a baby girl, I wanted a unified home for her to grow up in. I thought about the internal models she would form, and how I could give her the most stable, good inputs — much like the models I built for work. So I entered RCIA. About two months in, an instructor put an image of Jesus on the screen, and I had my first true moment of conversion. I finally realized Salvation wasn't only something He did for mankind — it was something He did for me, because He knew and loved me. I had leaned on reason my whole life, and I finally found my footing in faith. The two, I saw, were made to work together.

I dove into the Catechism, and especially St. Thomas and the Summa, and realized my hunger for answers stood in the shadow of those who had asked these same questions for centuries — drawing their answers from the mysteries of the Church. The statistical view of human nature I'd been forming was really just a glimpse of virtue and vice at work in the mechanism of our salvation. The rosary and the sacramentals, I came to see, were tools God gave us for that work. Near the end of RCIA, our priest told us our faith must be lived, and I took that to heart. After confirmation I joined the Knights of Columbus and our parish's rosary ministry.

As my children continued to come, I worried about the world shaping them. Social media, phones, algorithms — how would they grow up in an age of distraction? I trusted that God would protect His Church, but I felt called to be His instrument - to find new ways to put my faith into action. I knew the rosary's power to build virtue through repetition — but against feeds and AI systems, it felt like bringing a bow and arrow to modern combat. Yet I knew everything that exists is good, created by God; it is only a matter of rightly ordering it. The same technology could make the rosary richer, and hold our focus in a distracted world.

God had led me to Him and given me a unique set of skills — and I finally had a use for them that mattered. I began designing, coding, and prototyping. Iteration by iteration, Meditation Machine took shape: not merely a fitness tracker for faith, not merely AI prayer content, not merely a social platform for Catholics — but all of these as one. A way to track your prayer, to become the author of your own meditations, and to pray for and with the faithful. Finally, a modern weapon for spiritual warfare.